Re: Having trouble to partition my hard drive during Red Hat Installation

[Diego del Río <diegodelrio hotmail com>]

Thank you for your help Leonard! Now i understand what's happening.
I 've wrote some questions below:
> >     1GB Primary Dos Partition
> >     2GB Extended Dos Partition
> >     13 GB NTFS Partition
> >     3.1 GB Unallocated
> > i failed when i tried to add the second
> > partition. I got the message "The partition you asked to add could
> > not be allocated. No free primary"
>
> Your problem is you only have one primary partition left. Although
>  the kernel has no problem with it there is not one distribution - that
>  I know of, maybe Grendel will tell me Debian can do this - that lets
>  you create a second extended partition during installation.
> You can only create a second extended partition during installation
> by trickery. fdisk will not even report the
> partitions inside the second partition properly.
> I think you'ld need sfdisk for that.

What if i could boot the kernel from a floppy and run fdisk or sfdisk from
there to create the extended
linux partition? .. and then install linux on that partition, is it
possible?

> The problem with a second extended partition is that if you create new
> partitions in the first extended the numbering of the partitions in the
> second will shift as well. Although not recommendable for inexperienced
users there
> is no technical obstacle to implement this. Of course you should create
> linux extended partitions, because windos will get confused by multiple
extended
> dos partitions.

>  So you either have to free some space on your extended partition and put
> your swap partition there or you have to hide the extended partition
manually,
> do your install on an extended linux partition, edit /etc/fstab to reflect
> the situation after the dos extended partition reappears. But this
procedure
> is somewhat dangerous if you are careless. Have a boot floppy handy at any
> time.

I don't understand this part... when do i have to hide the dos extended
partition?
I haven't installed any linux system yet. So where is the /etc/fstab file
supposed to be found?

>  I recommend you try the first (create some space for a swap partition on
> hda2), but if you want to try the latter let me know and I'll dig in my
> archive for a description. In that case also post your current partition
> layout (fdisk -l /dev/hda), so we can make sure you fill in the right
> partitions when editing /etc/fstab.

I'll try the second way; in the next days i'll post the information you
asked me.

Thanks again Leonard.
Bye